A journal of exploring the Twilio platform from the ground up. Written by Reid Butler, co-creator of Callin' Oates. (Not affiliated with Twilio)

Getting Set….

When Michael and I got together to start playing with the Twilio tools and APIs for the first time, I was immediately intrigued by the simplicity of the system and how well Twilio had laid out the guide for beginners. As you could see in my first post, the necessary code is pretty straightforward. However, there was some pre-work that had to be done prior to our first lines of code being written.

Before we could really get started, we had to build out a primitive dev environment to allow us to collaborate on the codebase while experimenting. Here is what we needed:

dotCloud account for deploying the applications. Once you have an account, you will need to install their command line interface (CLI) application. Instructions available here. If you already have access to a server on the web, you might be able to skip this step and use your own.

Twilio account. Free to create and play around with. Go get one…..I’ll wait.

A Twilio phone number to use. Once you get into your Twilio account, go ahead and buy a number. I didn’t worry about the area codes, most cell phones these days are free long distance anyway.

I was most familiar with PHP, so I chose that as the basis for our work. Depending on the language of your choice, you will likely need to download the API libraries from Twilio.

Michael and I are Apple fanboys so all of this development was done on our Macs.

Our first usage of the system was going to simply be for exploration of the platform while learning the nuts and bolts of the TwiML language used to power our future applications. Once our dev environment was created and running we turned to the Twilio docs, specifically their quickstart guides to learn. The first example, Hello Monkey.